Overkill much, noob?

I was going to space my posts out, but this is enough of a sore point you get the rant up front.

How often have you, the healer, had someone ridicule you for “overhealing”? Odds are at least once, and probably several times. How often have you in turn ridiculed a mage (for example) for doing 10,000 point of damage to a mob that only had 4000? My bet is that everyone ooo’s and aaah’s over the uber-damage instead.

What blinking idiocy. For the most part, watching overhealing is much like watching overkill – an absurd waste. It’s done, really, because while the damage capacity of the mobs are estimated, the health of your fellow players is KNOWN, and so it can be specifically measured. Overkill…. can’t.

Here’s the deal. The only time you should be concerned with overheals is when you went out of mana (oom) with the fight still in progress. (As it happens, that same issue applies to other spellcasters as well.) If you wasted mana on heals that weren’t necessary, and so didn’t have them for the last little bit, then you need to pay attention to overheals. Otherwise, it’s a whine.

Now having said that, I do recommend you strive to minimize overheals during easy runs for the same reason hunters should practice kiting and chain-trapping when there’s no pressure. With practice, when you need it (whether that’s facing VanCleef and his friends or when a 6-pull in Shadow Labyrinth suddenly gets a couple of Malicious Instructors joining the fun) you have it. But until then, if everyone is alive at the end of the battle and you’ve still got mana, you’ve done it right.

And when that mage, the one who had to resort to a wand for the last mob when he went OOM, sneers at you after posting an overheal report, you have my permission to quote the title of this post right back at the fool.

About…

I've experience with many priests of many races and specs on several servers. The more I play, the more I realize how much I do not yet know. This is a share of some of what I have learned.
My main these days is Zingiber on the Undermine server.